Saturday, November 10, 2007

The 2008 Democratic candidates are beholden to a "hyper-partisan, politically paranoid" liberal base that could endanger the final nominee's chances of winning next year's presidential election, Joe Lieberman, the former vice-presidential Democratic candidate, said yesterday.

In his most outspoken attack on fellow Democrats since he was unsuccessfully challenged last year by Ned Lamont, a liberal Democrat, for his Senate seat in Connecticut, Mr Lieberman yesterday said he might not vote for the Democratic presidential nominee next year.

He argued that George W. Bush and the Republican presidential candidates remained truer than the Democratic party to its tradition of a "moral, internationalist, liberal and hawkish" foreign policy that was established by presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John Kennedy.

"The Democratic party I grew up in was unafraid to make moral judgments about the world beyond our borders," he said.

"[Today's Democrats] are inclined to see international problems as a result of America's engagement with the world and are viscerally opposed to the use of force - the polar opposite to the self-confident and idealistic nationalism of the party I grew up in."

[. . .]Mr Lieberman called on Democrats to follow the words of Arthur Vandenberg, the mid-20th century US senator, who said that politics should "stop at the water's edge". Before voting, Mr Lieberman said he would first assess each nominee's platform - "just like any other voter would".

I always thought that Lieberman was the best man in the Democrat Party, which made it almost inevitable that they would drive him out of that cesspool of a party.